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It's likely that today will finally be the decisive vote on healthcare reform. Over thirty million Americans currently lack health coverage and a good many more are losing insurance along with their jobs. Beyond this, lots of people who pay for health coverage find their insurance won't compensate them when they need it most, either through rescission or because their illnesses are categorized as pre-existing conditions. The reform bill will address these conditions.

While healthcare reform could have done more to lower costs and provide an affordable public option, the moderate provisions that remain in the bill are still intensely controversial. The resistance to reform has engendered a backlash on the right that has taken to the streets. Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, two students at Wright State University, produced this terrific coverage of the last Tea Party gathering against healthcare reform in Washington this past week. It's worth a few minutes to check out the sort of sloganeering that's passed for argument in opposition to any serious reform of the system.

Paul Krugman sums up the situation on health care reform nicely in his column today. It's decision-time. A few months back, we almost had an imperfect, but enormously significant reform which had passed both houses of Congress. Now, we might just get almost the same package passed, finally. It's up to a few members of Congress to step up.

The alternative, as Krugman points out, is more of the same bone-crunching cruelty that is health insurance today in America. People get thrown off the rolls when they become ill, are undercovered or not covered at all when they are well (or at least think they are), and are paying premiums without knowing whether they'll be honored when it counts.

This weekend should finally tell whether the United States joins the ranks of every other developed nation in providing for reasonably universal coverage, whether imperfectly or not.

One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years — possibly a decade or more.

Anyone who has spent time trying to understand the financial meltdown of 2008 has learned about derivatives and credit default swaps. What the general public probably hasn't learned is that nothing has happened since the markets went haywire to make the complicated and opaque derivatives market safer. No new regulatory legislation has passed and the legislation that has been introduced has loopholes big enough to burst a bubble in.

Today's NY Times editorial sheds some additional light on why derivatives need to be regulated and how the financial lobby has worked to prevent effective regulation from getting in the way of their lucrative— and unsafe— market in exotic products:

A big part of the problem is that derivatives are traded as private one-on-one contracts. That means big profits for banks since clients can’t compare offerings. Private markets also lack the rules that prevail in regulated markets — like capital requirements, record keeping and disclosure — that are essential for regulators and investors to monitor and control risk...

The big banks claim that derivatives are used to hedge risk, not for excessive speculation. The best way to monitor that claim is to execute the transactions on fully regulated exchanges, pass rules and laws to ensure stability, and appoint and empower regulators with independence and good judgment to enforce compliance.

Without effective reform, the derivative-driven financial crisis in the United States that exploded in 2008, and the Greek debt crisis, circa 2010, will be mere way stations on the road to greater calamities.

If you were wondering what's wrong with Washington, check out this little tidbit. While creating jobs and keeping Americans in their homes has taken a backseat to posturing over who's to blame, election-year fundraising is in the ascendancy.

Case in point:

A Republican left RNC Finance Chairman Rob Bickhart's how-to-fundraise Powerpoint presentation in a hotel ballroom in Florida on February 18. Politico's Ben Smith reports on its contents.

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives...

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.

The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”...

In a section called "RNC Marketing 101," the following categories and motivations for giving were outlined:

"...small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

Frank Bruni's NY Times Magazine piece on Scott Brown makes one think more gently of the new Senator from Massachusetts. While Brown says little in his interview with Bruni to change a general impression of intellectual shallowness and political opportunism, he is nonetheless a subject engendering personal sympathy. I'm not sure that's what Brown was going for as he embarked on a career in the US Senate, but while the Republican flavor-of-the-month isn't going to win any policy initiative contests, his personal history makes for great copy.

The weird stuff we've all heard about, the Cosmo centerfold, the reckless insinuations about the President's parentage, setting up the general public with his daughters, this stuff isn't really better understood after reading Bruni's piece. What is interesting, however, is the illumination of a childhood seriously lacking in male role models, coupled with Brown's ability to overcome lots of emotional (and physical) blows to his young pysche. Brown, like Bill Clinton or any number of love-starved political stars, seems to have started out as the kind of kid you couldn't help rooting for, a boy who managed, despite a troubled childhood, to make good and to win over teachers and neighbors, who helped him to become a successful adult.

One wonders if we wouldn't all be better off if guys like Brown (or Clinton) ended up as grownups helping to resolve the personal and societal issues that made them who they are, perhaps publicizing efforts to combat domestic violence or promoting summer educational programs, instead of looking for substitute love from the electorate. But, hey, that's American politics— and we'll probably see guys like Brown forever, till we get off the politics-as-celebrity kick...assuming that ever happens. Meanwhile, we're taking bets that Brown's dysfunctional story hasn't completely played out in public yet...

North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller has proposed an interesting solution to the seemingly intractable mortgage crisis affecting a vast number of American homeowners. Rather than creating a new program to deal with mortgages currently in foreclosure or underwater, Miller suggests reviving a Depression-era entity, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC).

HOLC was originally created in 1933 by the Roosevelt Administration. It's mission was to buy up distressed mortgages from the banks and then restructure them in negotiations with homeowners. HOLC eventually turned a slight profit, according to Miller, by the time its last mortgages were paid off in 1951, but in the first years of its existence, the agency was credited with averting a threatened collapse of the 1930's real estate market and with keeping homeowners in their houses— thereby avoiding mass evictions and suffering across the country.

Current programs, like the Obama Administration's HAMP program, are not doing the job of stabilizing real estate markets and helping homeowners to make loan payments workable on salvageable mortgages. HOLC, on the other hand, has a record of being able to intervene to make terms with homeowners, whether by reducing the principle of a loan in an underwater market, renting a home back to the family living in it on a long-term basis, or devising a payment restructuring as needed.

If the program were revived, homeowners would apply to HOLC, which could pick workable situations to become involved in. The banks would then relinquish the mortgage to HOLC in exchange for a percentage of the full value of it (through eminent domain), thereby restoring some sense of reality to the balance sheets of mortgage holders. Then, negotiations between the homeowner and the agency would be agreed upon. The restructured mortgages would be signed by HOLC and the homeowner, replacing the old mortgage with one that would be more workable and be serviced by HOLC.

I'm not an expert in mortgages, but the outline of the proposal has the appealing aspect of a history of effectiveness, unlike the programs not currently working. I'd like to hear readers' thoughts on it.

Here's a link to an article in the New Republic by Congressman Miller about his proposal.

Today's headlines are another case in point, showing how a lack of transparency and regulation in finance has led the world to the brink of economic disaster. Turns out that Greece had a little help getting to the point of fiscal catastrophe—from Goldman Sachs:

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint... a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards...

Henry Banta at the Nieman Watchdog blog has written an important piece on assessing the media's role in responding to the current economic mess we are in. It's must-reading and points to how we must demand more good coverage of smart economic thinking, especially now that the free markets/efficient markets mantra has led us to rack and ruin. Here's an excerpt:

What seems most difficult for the media to comprehend is that the economic collapse was an intellectual failure. It followed from an unquestioning faith in an economic theory that was simply wrong. It produced an economic policy that was explicitly grounded on false assumptions. But the nostrums of this failed policy have been the unquestioned basis of our economic policy for thirty years. They were translated into political mantras that were endlessly chanted by our political and economic leaders. The notion that they led us into a disaster has not sunk in to the public mind, much less that of the media. The media find it safer to avoid the basic economic issue and treat it all as a matter of politics. We have yet to hear David Gregory on Meet the Press, or any of his colleagues, ask a Republican leader how their current policies differ from those of George W. Bush or why we should expect them to produce different results.

Did anyone out there see Jon Stewart's recent interview with Newt Gingrich? It strikes me that despite leaving office to become a fabulously well-paid speaker on the lecture circuit, Gingrich remains the same sort of petty, personal pit-bull he always was as Speaker of the House. While being gently steered towards a more philosophical discussion by Stewart, Gingrich remained intent on firing off his "radical Obama" talking points, no matter what inconvenient facts might get in the way. If only Obama were so radical, we might be getting out of the stalled, unemployment-laden economy we're in now.

The funny thing was, Gingrich wanted, in this interview, which was preceded by a great parody piece from Ron Oliver at the RNC winter meeting in Hawaii, to change the subject— fast. Oliver had parodied the Republicans for their excesses and their high-priced feasting on the beach while the country is mired in such an economic jam, so Gingrich wanted to talk terror instead. Always a safe distraction from any discussion about economics, he figured, Newt launched into what a "radical" Obama is for having the 9/11 trial here in New York City, instead of summarily executing the defendants like FDR did with German spies during WWII, in violation of the US Constitution.

Stewart defended the terror trial in terms this New Yorker understands well. He wanted to see the defendants tried here to show the Al Qaeda "thugs" that we aren't afraid of them— as well as to display the resilience of our system of jurisprudence. Gingrich was having none of that. Constitutional rights, who needs 'em? Be like FDR, he challenged Obama (invoking a President Gingrich isn't often caught praising). So one of Roosevelt's least proud moments, slamming through the quick execution of some German spies in a kangaroo court before anyone could say "Gesundheit," back in 1942, was his example. Newt probably thinks the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war was a great idea, too. I wish Stewart had asked him.

But the best moment came after the interview.

Stewart had parried Gingrich's support for taking the Christmas underpants bomber out of the criminal justice system by asking why the Bush Administration tried shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who is now serving life without parole, in civil court. Gingrich, never waiting a beat, brushed Stewart aside. Reid had been an American citizen, so there was no comparison with the Nigerian underpants guy, just a similarity in their explosive attire accessories. So there.

But even though Stewart had been temporarily bludgeoned into submission by Gingrich's 'astute' legal jab, his producers had not. By the time the show wrapped, Stewart was reminded that Reid was in fact a British national, but imagined that Gingrich would soon find some other totally important reason why his case was different from the current one.

Funny. Yet sad. Our current political scene leaves the unemployed, the homeless, and the underemployed out in the cold, even while our daily political chatter centers on non-issues and non-facts. Let's hope we can get back to getting Americans to work again sometime soon— and back to the business of making our country whole and productive.

Historian Howard Zinn, who we lost in January at age 87 to a heart attack, worked throughout his lifetime to create a different America, one based on human values and the rights of ordinary people to control their own destinies. Zinn wasn't waiting for an American political leader, espousing hope and change, to make the world a better place; he advocated that the people pressure all our leaders through direct action to create jobs, to fight against corporate domination of our politics, to break down racial barriers, and to insure decent healthcare for everyone. Moreover, Zinn worked to end the dominance of the military industrial complex that has so shaped the post-World War II world.

These were just a few of the goals Zinn illuminated in his academic work, by documenting great movements that have pushed our history forward. He spent his lifetime presenting American history as a series of alternatives between passivity in the face of power and the people's occasional willingness to engage in struggles that have not always succeeded fully or quickly, but have eventually led to greater freedom, more economic power for ordinary working people, the poor and the oppressed. His most popular work, The People's History of the United States, has helped preserve a narrative of American movements for change and struggle that helped shape our history every bit as much as the powerful and well-connected leaders who rode astride the changes they created.

For me, Howard Zinn's work, Postwar America 1945-1971, played a formative role in developing a perspective of my own on the country I lived in as a young person. It stood on its head everything I thought I understood about the role our nation played in the world after the end of the Second World War and made me think about how different a place the planet might be had Franklin Roosevelt's emphasis on aiding self-determination kept preeminence after his death in 1945, instead of being subsumed in a fearful mania that led to the Cold War. Zinn's book and the courage of a high school history teacher named James Bunnell to disseminate revisionist histories to his students during the 1970's helped shape my life and outlook. I began to feel differently about how to address power and to find it important to tell people's stories, rather than relying on histories crafted solely from the point of view of those who would bend it to their own substantial economic and political interests.

I never met Zinn, but followed his work and the controversies he encountered and obviously enjoyed during a lifetime of afflicting the powerful and encouraging Americans to do the same. In this blog, a place where I spend a fair amount of time discussing politics and social history, it seems right to remember the life of a man who empowered so many like me to take journalism away from being solely the domain of those who own the presses and give it back to the people. Zinn helped create a world in which so many of us now write, film, and discuss politics and history as a living and democratic study, not simply a discipline given over to those who are most connected to the powerful and well financed. Zinn lived just long enough to see a version of his People's History finally made into a televised performance as The People Speak , hopefully making his work even more accessible to new generations of Americans who may otherwise never have heard the stories of slaves, abolitionists, farmers, laborers, feminists, and war resisters, except perhaps in passing reference.

Rather than summarizing more of his work here, I leave it to readers to follow the links below to read the remembrances and anecdotes of his friends and colleagues and to access some of Zinn's books, articles and notable confrontations. I think one excerpt from The People's History of the United States below will help those unfamiliar with Professor Zinn's work frame his perspective and I will close with it:

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States.